OVER 50 letters chronicling the love affair between Kevin O'Higgins, the Free State minister, and Hazel Lavery, the wife of the painter Sir John Lavery, are to go on show as parts of a public exhibition at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin later this month. The letters were discovered five years ago in a collection of correspondence belonging to Lady Lavery's daughter, Mrs Alice Gwynn, by the author of a new Lady Lavery biography.
The exhibition, Hazel Lady Lavery, Society and Politics, which will open to the public on September 19th and will run until November 3rd, coincides with the publication of the new biography, Hazel A Life of Lady Lavery 1880-1935, by Sinead McCoole.
Kevin O'Higgins, Cumann na nGaedheal Minister for Justice and External Affairs, wrote the letters to Lady Lavery between 1923 and the week of his death four years later, according to Ms McCoole, who discovered the letters in 1991. O'Higgins, who defended the execution of 77 Republicans between 1922 and 1923 during the Civil War, was assassinated by Republican gunmen on July 10th, 1927.